This final post is the second one responding to a passage from chapter four of Confessions of a Young Man:  Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. In my last post, I examined what the word 'perverse' is doing in this passage. I suggested that Confessions draws upon a number of different meanings associated with the word ‘perverse’ that were floating around at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a ‘perverse’ text in form and contents, I claimed. And I want to say something very similar about the word ‘morbid’. Like ‘perverse’, several different meanings of ‘morbid’ are relevant to this passage from Confessions; and like ‘perverse’, the word ‘morbid’ acquired pa